Saturday, 30 July 2016

You might wonder, amid all the
pontificating here, when the author has time to actually commit wargaming. I
mean, it must take up most of his limited mental capacity just writing this
stuff, let alone the time it takes to read some of the obscure tomes he refers
to, to make actual wargaming a practical impossibility.

You would, of course, be right.

Nevertheless, occasionally
wargaming does happen. For the last few weeks (or possibly months) I have been
working up towards having a battle, as the estimable Mrs P calls it. Why, you
might ask, has it taken you so long?

As those of you with very long
memories might recall, the current campaign of choice is one set in around 360
BC in Greece and the surrounding seas, islands and bits of the Persian Empire.
The first, and so far only, battle we an episode in a Spartan Civil War where
one king and his allies defeated the other, with a little help from his Theban
friends.

For battlefields I usually use a
random terrain generating system, and takes what it throws at me. For the
Spartan battle I landed up with a ditch running across the battlefield, and so
had to pause while I created some ditches. This was not too hard, but it did
take some effort and a tiny bit of ingenuity, and the resulting battle, with
the new terrain, was an interesting success.

This time, my random campaign
system (OK, it is not quite that random, but it does throw up some interesting
battles between groups that the Greeks would probably not have recorded)
yielded an encounter between a Persian punitive expedition and some
recalcitrant Thracians. Needless to say, my mind’s eye was filled with famous
episodes from wargame history, such as Charles Grant’s Wagon Train Table Top
Teaser, and Donald Featherstone’s punitive expedition to the North-West
Frontier as described, if I recall correctly, in Wargame Campaigns.

I accordingly reverted to my
random terrain system, and started to roll. And here everything unravelled, of
course. I rolled a settlement (fair enough, we have to have a target for a punitive
expedition, after all), a road, and a river. And that was it. Not much for the
Thracians to hide behind and jump out at the Persians from.

A little thought and a few more
dice rolls yielded the fact that at least the Persians would have to ford the
river to attain their target. A few more dice rolls also established that both
sides were, in total, employing more peltasts that are in my collection. However,
a little sweep through my collection and pondering yielded the Persian peltasts
being re-interpreted as earlier Persian infantry, possibly militia types left
over from the invasion of Greece a century or so before.

This left me with only three
further problems. Firstly, there was the fact that my terrain box had no rivers
in it. Secondly that my road sections were both inadequate and, if looked at
sideways, nearly as tall as the figures. Thirdly was the problem that my
buildings did not, by any stretch of the imagination, cover a town and port on
the north coast of Turkey.

The road problem was the simplest
to solve. A number (about 5, I think) of new road sections were produced,
consisting of ‘fun foam’ with glued and dusted banks. A lot lower than the
originals, and something that the troops can see over. I also managed to make a
junction piece, and some curved sections as well. A great deal of terrain for
minimal cost and effort, I thought (rather smugly, as it turns out).

The rivers were a bit more
problematic. I did the same again with the banks, but then thought that it
would be nice if the water bit were, at least, slightly shiny. I painted the
bed in a rather fetching cappuccino brown colour, and then applied a coat of gloss
varnish. That should do it. After it dried, I showed it to the estimable Mrs P,
who asked if I had varnished it yet. Another coat was applied, and then
another. Finally, a surface which was a little shiny was obtained, and so I
left it at that. A bit shiny is good enough for me.

This left me with the buildings. Some
Middle Eastern flat roofed houses and some Middle Eastern shacks were painted.
Fine, but not enough buildings were painted for the area to cover. I went
through my buildings, but even I cannot quite justify Saxon longhouses as Greek
or Thracian homes. A few Roman bits were added, but I really thought that I
would have to make the various bits left over from my Irregular Mediterranean
town. Fortunately, I found a half-painted Italian farmhouse, that was going to
double as a mansion, and I am now in the process of finishing that.

And this ramble has, finally, led
me to the point. All this is very fine (if very slow, I’ll grant) wargame fare.
Perhaps I have given myself too long to think about it. But is a wargame where
one side sets out to destroy the homes of the other really a respectable game?

I have even written rules for the
length of time the Persians have to occupy the town to consider their mission
accomplished. I cannot deny that such missions did take place, and probably did
during the Persian Empire (certainly they did under Alexander, and the Romans
did a lot of punitive expedition-ing). There is no doubt, really, that the game
is historically justified. The war might even be legal – the Persians, to
measure them by a later yard-stick, may well be entirely justified in their
actions. So, too, might the Thracians. But as I, as a wargamer, justified in creating
the battle, involving the (admittedly fictional) destruction of people’s homes
and livelihoods?

I am almost certainly not going
to let this qualm put me off, of course. It is, after all, fiction. I have no pretence
that my town would look like a Greek town in Persia, not that my 360 BC
campaign bears anything like resemblance to the ‘real’ thing. But just
occasionally I do get a little bit wobbly about this. Someone tell me I don’t
need to, please.

Saturday, 23 July 2016

One of the questions that comes
up periodically is that of why we have toy soldiers at all. After all, the
critics or commentators say, they act as tokens and therefore could simply be
replaced by another token. So our beautifully painted First Foot Guards could
(and, the implication perhaps is) should be replaced by a scruffy piece of
cardboard with the name of the unit scrawled on it.

There do not seem to be too many
answers to this suggestion. We tend to smile nicely, and move on, continuing to
buy, paint and wargame with our beautiful creations. The critic too tends to
continue wargaming with toy soldiers. The deduction has to be that there is
more than simple cussedness (although that, presumably, plays a part) in this
continuation of an expensive and time consuming aspect of our hobby.

I know that there are good
aesthetic reasons for using figures in games, although I am not really the
person to comment on aesthetics. There is, I know, pleasure in handling
beautifully painted figures on nice terrain. It is a feeling, I think, of
experiencing beauty, as in the experience of sitting at a table carefully laid
for a meal. The aesthetics enhances the experience, the symmetry of the table
makes eating more of a pleasure, the attractive figures and terrain makes
wargaming similarly more pleasurable.

We can, of course, eat off a
table upon which the cutlery has just been dumped. We can wargame using
unpainted figures on a table where the terrain is marked out by chalk. In both
cases, the primary aim can be achieved, that of eating or having a wargame. But
the pleasure in each is below what it can be if the table is prepared more
carefully.

There is, however, a second,
perhaps more minor issue concerning wargame figures. A set of pieces of
cardboard do not give us the instant recognition of troop type and status as
wargame figures do. For example, I can tell at a glance if this base of soldiers
is cavalry or infantry. If they were cardboard, I would need to read the card. Even
if the pieces used those NATO standard symbols, I would still need to read and
recognise them. The cognitive load is just a little higher when having to
translate from symbol to troop type.

The toy soldiers, therefore, give
us an instant visualisation of what the base consists of. It, can, of course,
go a bit further, depending on our specific knowledge. We might recognise this
base as being the Imperial Guard, and that base as being a levy infantry battalion.
That too might cause us to alter our channels of attack of defence. This sort
of information would (within limits, of course) have been available to battlefield
commanders, and, we could argue, therefore should be available to the wargamer.
While again, it is true, that the information could be available by scanning
the information on a piece of cardboard, the cognitive load is less if we just
can notice that ‘Cripes! That’s the Guard’ and react accordingly. The
instantaneous visual quality of the figures makes a difference.

Now of course this situation has
to be nuanced. There are some very nice printed pieces of cardboard out there
which come fairly close to the recognition that can be accorded to wargame
figures. I suppose too that there are wargame figures that are rather hard to
recognise, either through poor casting or painting. There might also be rather
fuzzier areas where the figure for the historical equivalent cannot be found,
and a substitute is used instead. Nevertheless, we do make efforts to find a
substitute that is close to the original. We do not substitute Panzer
Grenadiers for Seventeenth Century Moroccan musketeers.

I think a third element might be
to aid our imagination. While I can engage a part of my brain in cognitive
examination of the table top to see what is to be done to the best advantage, I
am not sure that that is the only reason for wargaming. I can, of course, shuffle
pieces of cardboard around on a campaign map to create a battle, and that is
one thing. But pieces of cardboard clashing on a table top does not fire my
imagination as to what might be going on in the ‘model world’. For that to
happen more easily, I think I need figures and terrain.

Thus, I think there is a big difference
between looking at a map and saying ‘X Brigade is holding this BUA’ and ‘X
Brigade is defending the village’. If we can see the troops on the table,
perhaps it is easier to imagine them digging in, loop holing the walls and
cooking the hens than if it is just a cardboard counter on a brown bit of map.

Of course, cardboard counters
have their place in wargaming more broadly. They are, as I’ve mentioned, much
more appropriate for campaign games and, of course, for more modern wargames
where the fighting is on a front several hundred miles wide. The counters have
some advantages over wargame figures as well, in ease of production, storage and,
indeed, the quantity of information which they can contain. But I do not see
them really replacing wargame figures, even if such a replacement were
necessary or desirable.

I do not think that I am trying
either to denigrate wargame figures or cardboard counters. Each has its place
in wargaming. But I am trying to suggest that the wargame figure is a little
more than just an interchangeable token. The figure itself, and its disposition
on a base (are they in line, dispersed, and so on) also contains information
about the type of soldier represented and the tactics they are employing. It does
so in an easily cognized way, which takes little effort in reading and
recognising by the player.

A base of wargame figures is not,
therefore, just a token. They cannot, I think, be easily swapped for another
token for aesthetic, cognitional and imaginative reasons, quite aside, of
course, from the thought that there would be no reason for doing the swap in
the first place, given that wargaming is a hobby.

Saturday, 16 July 2016

As with so many things in human
life, we, as the humans with those lives, are forced, somehow, to cope with it.
Largely we do this by categorizing things and people that we encounter. Thus,
we say of something with four wheels and an engine ‘it is a vehicle’. If we
want to be more specific, we say ‘it is a car’ or ‘it is a truck’, or whatever.
Once we have categorized the object in such a way, the details of it are of
less interest to us. It is a such-and-such and thus will be have in this sort
of expected way.

This way of thinking is as old as
Aristotle, and quite probably a lot older. Aristotle divided the world by genus
and species. We have a tree, it behaves like a tree. We have another tree. It is
not the same as the first tree, but it looks similar, so it is the same
species. We have a third tree, which is also a tree but it is different to the
first two. It is a different species but the same genus. All of them, by
whatever means, are recognised by us as trees.

This sort of thing can, of
course, break down. We categorize things that orbit the sun as planets. But then
we find asteroids, and have to work out if they fit into the genus planet or
are something else. Similarly, we can classify Pluto as a planet, and then
change our mind and call it a planetoid, and then, perhaps, change our minds
back. Our neat categories do not fit nature quite as well as they seemed to
before we encountered this sort of data.

We might wonder if this really
matters. After all, so far as we know, Pluto is not sentient, and is unlikely
to take economic sanctions against Earth as a result of us being able to decide
if it is a planet or not. On the other hand, the arguments over the status of
Pluto do make it sound that something is at stake in the classification, even
if it is rather hard to make out what that something is, exactly.

Humans do this sort of
classification all the time. We classify rocks, life, planets, stars,
activities and food, to name but a few. And our classification systems tend to
overlap: food can be nice or nasty, good for us or not, fattening and
pleasurable, and healthy and dull. Out categories overlap and, if we stop to
think about them for a few minutes, can be overwhelming. But mostly they work,
even if it would be nice if ‘experts’ could work out whether eating, say, chocolate,
is bad for us or not. I suspect the answer is ‘it depends’, because so many
things are driven by context.

Which brings me, in a roundabout
sort of way (mmm, chocolate) to wargaming. We do a lot of categorizing in
wargaming. Our troops are heavily categorized, for one thing: infantry,
cavalry, light or heavy, we categorize by weapon, tactics, training, morale,
expectation of performance and so on. Of course, this is how we make wargame
rules work. The rules, the models, have to accommodate everything into as few
categories as possible.

We do the same for battles, of
course. We have set piece battles, ambushes, encounters, skirmishes, sieges,
escalades and so on. We also write rules for the specific sort of battle. We have
‘big battle’ rules, skirmish rules, role playing, and, I dare say somewhere,
rules for medium sized wargames as well. We read history (itself a category,
incidentally, wargamers, at least those who do read history, tend to read
military history, a sub-genre of the species) and work out the sort of battles
fought, according to our schemes of understanding.

In this way, of course, we can
all stand accused of imposing our categories upon the world. Now, I am no
Kantian, but I think there is a grain of truth in his claim that we impose our
pre-conceived categories on our world. The best discussion of this is, in fact,
I think, Douglas Adams’ concept of ‘someone else’s problem’ fields. The general
idea is that we do not see some things because we think they are someone else’s’
problem, and thus we ignore them. We impose a pattern on the world and miss
things out which we do not want to see.

I suppose the danger here is
reading our histories of battles in this way, or reading the battle narrative
with a certain point of view, set of rules, or array of models in mind. This scheme
we already have can, and probably will, dispose us to read history in a certain
way. Depending on what we think about say, imperialism, colonialism can be read
as either bringing the benefits of civilization to the benighted heathen, or as
the systematic destruction of a functioning society for the gain of metropolitan
centres. Of course, there are also all points in between, and considerably more
nuanced points of view, but the point is that what we already think, what we
already conceive the world in categories as, will affect how we read and what
we make of it.

So finally, to wargamers
themselves. We assess other people in categories, of course. How else can we
survive? My cat categorizes the world into unfriendly and friendly, and runs
away from the former. I might categorize other wargamers into historical and
fantasy, or role player and figure gamer. In fact, as I’m sure we all could
agree, there is not a huge difference between these categories, and they are,
anyway, flexible to an almost unbelievable degree. But we have to do it to make
any sense of the world, and it does have unfortunate consequences.

One of the most powerful ways in
human experience to gain fresh insights or new ideas is to find a synergy with
something else. This is usually beyond the bounds of our categories, or at
least, across the boundaries of them. Harry Potter, for example, crossed the
categories of school story and fantasy novel (and made the author very rich
into the bargain). As wargaming is a relatively small hobby, can we do the
boundary crossing thing and gain from it?

Saturday, 9 July 2016

I have just been reading ‘Ambush:
Surprise Attack in Ancient Greek Warfare’ by Rose Mary Sheldon (2012,
Frontline: Barnsley). The aim here is to disabuse the reader of any concept of
there being a Western Way of War which revolves around stand up, knockdown,
drag out battles. As I have observed before, recent historiography of warfare
has rather claimed that there is such a thing as the Western Way of War, that
it started with the Greeks and comes up to date with such operations as the
invasion of Iraq.

Such claims started with Victor
Davis Hanson, particularly with his book of the same name. There has been a
fair bit of heat generated by it and, surprisingly for scholarly activity, a
fair bit of light, as well. Even more surprisingly, some of it is of potential
use to wargamers.

A fair number of people have
taken the trouble to attempt to refute Hanson. For example, John Lynn’s Battle
is an extended look at the western way of war, and if there is such a things as
an extended tradition from the Greeks through everyone else to today. His
answer is ‘no’. There is no such thing as an universal soldier, who has
basically been doing the same things for centuries while the technology of
doing it has change. Battles were fought as battles, each in their own way,
with people with a given world-view, technology of a given time and place, and
so on. There is no tradition of decisive battle reaching back to the Greeks.

A secondary thesis of the Western
Way of War concept is that the Greeks, and everyone else who derives their
concept of winning a war from them, are good, noble, courageous, moral and upstanding.
By contrast, of course, everyone who is not western in this sense is devious,
immoral, decadent, cowardly, and, most of all, likely to ambush you or attempt
to kill you at night, rather than stand up and be slaughtered by Western
armies. This stance, which has been named ‘military orientalism’ can, of
course, have overtones of racism and cultural superiority. It rather ignores
the fact that a opponent who is under-armed and overrun does not have that many
strategic and tactical options. All you can really do are surrender and hope
your opponent goes away or use guerrilla tactics. I think very recent history
tells us which is most likely.

Anyway, Sheldon’s book aims to
show that, in fact, Greek warfare had as much to do with the sneaky, indirect, surprise
attack and ambush as with good classical toe to toe stabbing and screaming. She
starts with the Iliad, for the very good reason that this was basic cultural
information for educated Greeks the world (Mediterranean) over. It may not have
happened, and not have happened in the way described, but it did and does
proscribe warfare for ancient Greek culture. The point is that the Greeks and
their opponents spend as much time ambushing and surprising each other as they
do in massed battles.

Sheldon goes so far as to suggest
that there are two strands in the poetic tradition, that of Achilles and that
of Odysseus. Achilles is the prime example, the exemplar, of the good warrior –
shining arms, ready to go nose to nose with anyone. The fact that he is hugely
prickly, thinks more of his honour than of his side, and is a regular pain in
the neck for his commanders might, or might not, have some bearing on this.

Odysseus, on the other hand, is
the exemplar of the ambush, the surprise attack, the indirect approach. Book X
of the Iliad shows him capturing a spy and obtaining the intelligence required.
Of course, further to this, it is Odysseus who comes up with the stratagem which,
finally, takes Troy. Achilles is dead by then, a victim of his own courage and
bravado.

Sheldon traces these two themes
down through Greek history, attempting to trace the evolution of the phalanx (a
subject mired in controversy and lack of sources) to the emergence of the
peltast. Greek armies, she observes, would not have needed peltasts if all
their battles had really been knock ‘em down and drag ‘em out massed phalanx
encounters. She also notes that part of the Spartan training was to go and
steal things (including food). These are hardly skills needed to fight in a
phalanx. Inherent in all this history is the idea that both ambushes and formal
battles were necessary parts of Greek warfare.

It did come about, however, that
later writers started to look upon the battle as being more virtuous, more
courageous, than the ambush. Ambushes are for the weak, the devious, the
Eastern. Battles are for the brave, the strong, and the moral. There emerges
some sort of denigration for the coward who takes away life from cover, or in
the night. This, Sheldon suggests, is firstly not true in the Greek tradition
anyway, but, secondly, the way in which some sort of Western Way of War can be
put together. It ignores vast swathes of evidence, and also takes an ethical
stance on ambush which the original protagonists would not have recognised.

Throughout history, I would
guess, well-armed troops have complained when the enemy has refused to come out
and fight in the correct manner. By this, I suspect, they mean ‘get slaughtered’.
Certainly in 17th Century North America the ‘skulking way of war’
adopted by the natives was despised and disparaged by the colonists. This is
propaganda, rhetoric, of course. The colonists would have blown any native
contingent away who did come and fight in their manner, so why would the
natives do such a thing? Whatever else the Native Americans might have been
they were not stupid.

And so to the wargaming question.
I have a feeling that ambushes and surprise attacks do take place on our
tables, but the question is whether we really write rules and scenarios that
are suitable for them. Most wargame rules I am aware of are for big battles.
Are we then in danger of falling into the military orientalism trap?

Saturday, 2 July 2016

I am not, and do not intend to
become, a First World War wargamer. There are a number of reasons for this, as
I have noted before, along the lines of the sheer size of most of the Western
Front battles, and the horrid experiences of the participants. I do accept that
the Western Front can be wargamed, it is just not for me.

However, the memorials of the events
are now passing us by, and there is a debate to be had over the ‘meaning’ of
those events. Was the Battle of Jutland a victory for one side or the other, or
a defeat, or a draw? What could have happened if the battle had gone in a
different direction? A similar debate is raging about the Somme. Some argue
that it was wasteful and tragic but not futile. Others claim that it was all
three. All seem to be seeking some sort
of meaning in the destruction and loss of life involved in both battles, and,
for the matter of that, in the whole war.

There are historiographically, a
number of views which can be taken, but broadly the debate splits into two. Firstly
there is the idea that the whole war and the Somme in particular, was a huge
waste of effort and of lives. This is broadly speaking the view of many First
World War poets and the ‘Lions Led by Donkeys’ and ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ sorts
of commentary. It is possibly worth noting that this view did not really gain
purchase in the popular consciousness until the 1920’s, with such texts as
Robert Graves’ ‘Goodbye to All That’ and Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Memoirs of an
Infantry Officer’. Possibly we could
also add to that list ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. The point is that the
cultural interpretation of the war shifted from it being a victory to it being a
disaster.

At alternative ‘revisionist’ view
of the Somme is that it was a vital learning curve for the massed British Army.
The historians who support this view regard the battle as part of the learning
curve for the generals and the units involved in how to win a battle in the
military and technological context of the early Twentieth Century. They observe
that while Haig did make mistakes, the army as a whole did learn how to do
things better, from artillery barrages to communications, the introduction of
the tank different ways of assaulting enemy trenches. They point out that, in
fact, British troops did not just climb out of their trenches and walk across
No Man’s Land into a hail of machine gun fire. The precise tactics adopted
varied unit by unit, and was not imposed by high command.

Was the battle a disaster? Well,
it depends on what you mean. For those involved it most likely was a disaster,
but the British Army was not broken by 1st July and the battle kept
going into the autumn. Politically, of course, the British had little choice.
The French (who were meant to be more heavily involved than they were) were
being bled dry at Verdun, which is a fact that rather few British historians
care to recall. For the British to stop an offensive while their allies were
attempting to stem the German assault (and later recapture ground where the
Germans had gone onto the defensive) would probably have been alliance-suicide.
Only the alliance of Britain and France was going to enable victory; Haig had
to keep the alliance intact.

There is a further view that the
Somme made the German High Command take notice of the British Army, which they
had previously rather disregarded. The later withdrawal to the Hindenburg line
is taken, by revisionist historians at least, as evidence that the German High
Command had decided that the British were a potent enough threat to require
special handling. Alternatively, of course, the withdrawal can be taken as
strategic, freeing units from the German Army to be transferred east to knock
the newly revolutionary Russia out of the war entirely. In that sense, of
course, it was successful and the troops were then transferred back west for the
1918 spring Offensive.

Is there a wargaming way of understanding
this? To some extent, there might be. For example, what might have happened in
1st July if Gough’s Reserve Army had been ordered forward rather
than stood down? An optimistic view suggests that while gains may have been
limited, ground would have been gained and held. A pessimistic view would argue
that the ground had been so badly damaged that any reserves would not have made
any difference and possibly been destroyed in attempting to reach the new front
lines. As it is, it seems likely that Haig was not aware of Rawlinson’s order
standing down Gough’s army, but it does seem that the impact of this could be
wargamed and a view taken as to the impact of the decision.

A wargaming answer to these sorts
of questions is, of course, speculative. But is it possible that something
along the lines of Phil Sabin’s ideas about mapping out the possible result and
parameters could be achieved here? It could certainly be argued that, at least,
careful and creative wargaming of the battle could provide models for the
arguments about the possibilities and mistakes that were made. While we cannot,
of course, base our historical assessment on wargaming alone, we might at least
develop some models of what happened and why, rather than relying on the
arguments of historians which are becoming, to be honest, rather sterile, in
that one side says ‘X’ and the other says ‘Not-X’, and there the debate gets
stuck.

So, there you are, all you modern
wargamers, a real challenge. What would have happened if Gough’s army had
advanced at, say, midday of 1st of July? Would be be celebrating a
British victory, albeit at heavy cost, of an even more tragic waste of life?